Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man was written in 1962, but much of it
reads as if it could have been written today. In a forensic and robust
re-assessment, political theorist Andrew Robinson highlights the merits,
and lacunae, of this pivotal work.
In Theory,
New in Ceasefire - Posted on Friday, October 22, 2010
By
Andrew Robinson
Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man was written in 1962, but much of it
reads as if it could have been written today: the flattening of
discourse, the pervasive repression behind a veil of ‘consensus’, the
lack of recognition for perspectives and alternatives beyond the
dominant frame, the closure of the dominant universe of meaning, the
corrosion of established liberties and lines of escape, total
mobilisation against a permanent Enemy built into the system as a basis
for conformity and effort… It was product of a previous period of
downturn and decomposition, similar in many ways to our own.
The largest difference from the present situation is that, contrary
to thirty years of neoliberalism and the latest wave of cuts, Marcuse
was writing at a time when the welfare state was growing and ordinary
people were becoming more affluent. This gives a different sense to the
repressive aspects of the context. Marcuse gives an impression of
people lulled into conformity, rather than bludgeoned or tricked.
The ‘one dimension’ of the title refers to the flattening of
discourse, imagination, culture and politics into the field of
understanding, the perspective, of the dominant order. Marcuse contrasts
the affluent consumer society of organised capitalism with a previous
situation of ‘two-dimensional’ existence. The two dimensions exist on a
number of levels, but for Marcuse express a single aspect: the
coexistence of the present system with its negation.
In culture, this second dimension was expressed in the role of
culture as critique, in the ways in which even conservative aspects of
culture contrasts with the prevailing order, providing characters (for
instance, tragic heroines and heroes) who are frustrated in the present
world, and also in the existence of a lively field of radical culture.
In thought, the gap emerges because of the distance between concepts and
their particular uses, the possibility of conceptually separating an
actor or object (a worker, a produced item) from its functional or
systemic context (work, commodities), and the contrast between ethical
values and existing realities.
The gap between the two dimensions is for Marcuse crucial to the
possibility of social change. The gap separates the possible from the
present, making it possible to imagine situations radically different
from the current system. The elimination of the gap makes it impossible
to think beyond the system’s frame, thus making it impossible to think
of alternatives except as repeating current social relations. The two
dimensions produce a gap or distance between what can be thought and
what exists, a gap in which critical thought can flourish. They rely on
an ‘unhappy consciousness’, discontented with the present and aware on
some level of its problems.
According to Marcuse, the gap has been closed by a process of almost
totalitarian social integration through the coordination of social
functions and the rise of consumerism and administrative thought.
Marcuse portrays this process as happening in a number of ways. One of
these is that consumer culture infiltrates lifeworlds and public opinion
comes into the private sphere: the system’s perspective comes into the
home through television, radio and consumed goods with particular
messages; it comes into communities through the inescapable news
headlines outside newsagents, the dominance of ‘public opinion’ and the
interventions of state officials.
Think, for instance, of the posters everywhere in Nottingham, UK,
advertising the latest crackdowns and providing phone numbers for
council ‘support’ in dealing with local problems in repressive ways
(shop a benefit ‘thief’, report ‘anti-social behaviour’, CCTV is here
‘for your safety’, such-and-such enemy of the people is banned from this
area for begging, petty theft and generally being poor…) One can
barely walk the streets today without either passively endorsing or
being jolted by such messages. Is this discursive onslaught really so
different from the propaganda crusades of classic totalitarianism? And
is it any coincidence that the rise of such discursive intrusion
coincides with attacks on flyposting and graffiti, and even a ban on
election posters on lampposts?
Furthermore, people are themselves ‘reduced’ through the rhythms of
conformity. Conformity is induced through repetition and habit, with
people lulled into a sense of hypnosis by the repeated rhythms of
factory work and mass consumption. This is reminiscent of Barthes’s
discussion of fashion: the system generates a kind of euphoria in its
repetition of difference within a closed frame. Needs are artificially
induced and manipulated, so they can be satisfied in systemically
recognised ways (this claim later forms the basis for Ivan Illich’s
analysis of schooling).
Systemic integration or social control is now based on satisfying
rather than frustrating needs, the trick being that it satisfies needs
that it itself creates. Marcuse could also have mentioned the ways in
which work, family and consumption tend to eat up all the available
hours in the day, so people no longer have time for introspection,
creative pursuits, diversification of lifeways, or ‘functionless’
socialising – so that, as Hakim Bey puts it, simply finding the time for
a group to be together without a basis in work, consumption or family
is already a difficult task, and an act of resistance.
According to Marcuse, the various mechanisms of integration lead to a
new kind of social closure which blocks even imaginary escapes. The
loss of the critical gap produces a ‘happy consciousness’ which accepts
the parameters of the system – though it is only superficially happy.
Another aspect of Marcuse’s view is that, while people’s basic needs are
satisfied, underlying fear, anxiety and aggression are never far from
the surface and are themselves made functional for the system.
In culture, the second dimension has been flattened out through a
loss of appreciation arising from the reduction of ‘high’ culture to
‘mass’ culture – the fact that music is being played in the background
in supermarkets and classics of world literature can be bought cheaply
in corner shops. This structural reduction reduces the distance between
culture and the present reality, turning it into an appendage of
advertisements and consumerism.
In recent times, we might think for instance of the way protest
music, including punk, rap, etc., is included in suitably redacted form
in the hit-parade and on mainstream radio broadcasts, reduced to its
sales ranking as a commodity. Or one might think of the loss suffered
by ‘classic’ critical texts, such as those of Marx, Deleuze or Sartre
(or indeed Marcuse), as a result of being treated as something to be
taught in classes and assessed in exams: instead of having relevance to
one’s life, or even being assessed as irrelevant for good reasons, they
are shunted into a field which is structurally constructed so as to
appear irrelevant to one’s life.
And at the same time, people who are not students or academics do not
read such things – either because reading them is study and therefore
work, to be avoided if unremunerated – or because they are defined as
‘theory’, as ‘difficult’, and therefore only for students and graduates.
Those who happen to have read such things may then be dismissed as
reproducing something which is irrelevant to most people’s lives, simply
because they have been consigned to a field of study which is defined
in advance as irrelevant. Through this process, the texts in general
reach neither the students who read them nor the people who don’t, and
their critical force is lost – despite the texts remaining legal, widely
available, and in many cases free online.
In thought, the rise of various positivist, functionalist and
operationalist analyses repressively reduces thought to the present.
Only what can be seen to exist is recognised as having a right to
recognition in language, and as a result, past and future realities are
excluded from language. Meanwhile, nouns are made to dominate over
verbs – description over doing (for instance, “globalisation” as fact
over specific practices of “globalising spaces”), and nouns are
identified with particular functions, so that imagining the thing aside
from its usual function becomes impossible (for instance, “democracy” is
taken to refer to the existing practices of western regimes, rather
than an ideal of self-government which these regimes claim to
actualise).
Language-use thus becomes hypnotic, or is reduced to a command which
cannot be refused (think for instance of advertising slogans and
political soundbites). While terms like “functionalist” and
“operationalist” are out of fashion, this way of thinking remains
dominant in mainstream social science, and in the rhetoric of business
and politics. Today we could take an example like “cognitive
behavioural therapy”, which seeks to reduce dissatisfaction to
dysfunctional thought patterns which the “patient” is induced or trained
to abandon because the thoughts mean they are failing to meet their
life-goals. Rather than using the fact that people are unhappy as an
indictment of the system, it blames people’s unhappiness on their own
capability for dysfunctional thought, and seeks to eliminate such
thought-paths – an approach reminiscent of Orwellian brainwashing.
In addition, the rational and the real are fused in the purely
instrumental nature of technological rationality as means-ends
calculation within the frame of what can be observed. It becomes
impossible to negate the system – to say that the system is wrong or
irrational – in widely recognised language. This is because everyday
language is rejigged towards always referring to functions within the
system. Try arguing with a Third Way supporter that Britain is not free
or democratic, and one comes up against this effect: either freedom is
quantitative, measured by Britain’s better ranking in some measurement
than, say, Zimbabwe, or it is systemically defined, referring to the
formal recognition of certain rights, or else it is deemed to be
something which is impossible and has never existed, and hence which
Britain cannot be condemned for lacking, and which is useless as a
concept.
This silences the voices of ‘other rationalities’: the actual fact
for instance that people cannot protest for dissident causes without
police persecution, that asylum seekers and people wrongly ‘suspected’
of terrorism are subject to terrifying dawn raids, that all kinds of
harmless practices (wearing a hood or baggy trousers, meeting friends,
giving out leaflets, riding a bike…) can be arbitrarily banned under
state-mandated orders, become matters which are somehow irrelevant to
the question of whether Britain is ‘free’ or ‘democratic’. Someone who
actually draws the logical conclusions of such abuses is deemed to be
living in a fantasy-world. One is thus dealing with a tautological
process whereby the system is justified as a result of the fact that it
exists, hence provides the only observable criteria, and hence passes
these criteria.
Marcuse uses the example of procedural responses to workers’
grievances in factories: the administrative response insists that
complaints be rendered more specific, that a complaint such as “wages
are too low” be rendered more precisely as an individual complaint, such
as that a particular worker cannot cover health expenses. Once thereby
reduced, the demands can be met cumulatively through small reforms.
Marcuse believes this covers up the underlying antagonism, because
the complaint that “wages are too low” actually combines two elements:
the specific situation of the worker, and a general grievance against
the wage system which implicitly refers to the situation of all workers
and can only be satisfied through the overthrow of the dominant system.
In carving off and satisfying the former component, and reducing the
entire grievance to this first component, the system silences the second
component, making it seem irrational and unthinkable.
There is also a psychological aspect here. Marcuse refers to the present situation as ‘repressive desublimation’.
Sublimation is a psychoanalytic concept which refers to a
defence-mechanism used to deal with a desire which has been repressed,
and so is unconscious. Often, it resurfaces in apparently ‘higher’
forms, providing a basis for cultural creativity. In Freud, this might
mean for instance, that a person with an oral fixation would become a
skilled orator or singer.
For Marcuse, such repression can also affect political desires: the
desire for liberation which cannot find conscious form (either as
socially taboo or because of a lack of an appropriate language) can find
indirect expression in fields such as art.
Marcuse argues that the peculiarly contemporary process of satisfying
particular desires in consumer society through systemically recognised
means leads to the elimination of sublimation: desires are
‘desublimated’, they can find social expression, but only in a
repressive way which eliminates what is in the particular demand more
than itself, the broader aspiration for liberation.
Here, I suspect that Marcuse exaggerates. Psychological repression
in some fields, particularly in relation to expressions of anger, is
still very pervasive, and the authoritarian family is alive and well,
both directly and in its toned-down “liberal” form.
Furthermore, there are many ways the system continues to frustrate
desires, even at a most basic level such as failing to provide
sufficient housing.
But he theorises an aspect of the situation which does sometimes
operate: the means of regulation today tend to decompose desires,
leaving less of a consolidated block for the unconscious to work with.
The political implications of Marcuse’s account suggest the need for
forms of resistance which radically refuse the dominant system, while
remaining pessimistic about such possibilities. Marcuse maintains that
western democracies are not really democratic, because people are
quietly prevented from thinking critically, and induced into making
choices which in any case remain within the systemic frame. Since this
is a product of quiet manipulation, and since it is built on a social
order which is basically authoritarian, it does not ground any claims to
systemic legitimacy.
More theoretically, Marcuse also argues that prevailing needs can
never provide a supreme basis for legitimacy, since the critique of a
system also critiques its socially-produced needs. This system has
various ways of managing dissent so as to maintain authoritarian
closure. ‘Repressive tolerance’, for instance, is a practice whereby
dissident perspectives are permitted only by being reduced to ‘opinions’
held as if as private property by individuals, ‘opinions’ the person is
entitled to, but which have no pull on others, which nobody is obliged
to take seriously as claims to truth, and which the dissident is not
entitled to act on.
The reduction of verifiable truth-claims to ‘opinions’ destroys any
requirement that the mainstream need to pay attention to them or address
specific allegations; they can ignore the beliefs as simply personal
matters, and suppress any attempt to act on them as unreasonable
imposition of personal views. While this kind of argument is sometimes
used to attack Marcuse as nascently authoritarian, it is better
understood as showing the limits to ‘democracy’ in an authoritarian
context, and the need for sustained critical engagement as a basis for
genuinely inclusive social practices.
One limit of Marcuse’s account is immediately obvious.
One-Dimensional Man was written on the eve of the 1960s wave of radical
struggles and protests which was to shake the foundations of the
dominant system. It is, perhaps, a limit of the work that it failed to
foresee this rupture, though such events always seem to come unexpected,
from unlikely sources. In my view, Marcuse makes this mistake because
he gives insufficient attention to marginalised groups, both within
America and worldwide.
The incorporation he discusses mainly affected the organised working
class, who as a Marxist, Marcuse looked to as the agents of social
change. Had he paid more attention, for example, to emerging
decolonisation struggles in the majority world and the rise of protest
movements among African-Americans, the limits to systemic closure would
have been clearer. Marcuse also perhaps exaggerates the extent to which
the closure of the system’s universe of meaning actually prevents
imaginative escape or radical movements.
To be sure, it alters such ‘outsides’ because of the fact that they
can no longer be realised inside the dominant frame, and for this very
reason, makes their break with the system necessarily more antagonistic.
It alters the form, not the possibility, of refusal. In this regard,
Marcuse would have benefited from something more like Negri’s approach
of theorising a cyclical relationship between new upsurges of resistance
and new processes of control.
Incorporation was a response to particular compositions of
resistance; it did not foreclose the possibility of resistance as such –
something we should remain aware of in the current downturn. Another
limit from my perspective is Marcuse’s persistent progressivism: in
spite of his vigorous critique of technological rationality, he also
persists in viewing it as ultimately progressive, as expressing the
triumph of humanity’s struggle against ‘necessity’ or nature, a view
which looks untenable in the light of later ecological critiques.
Marcuse’s emphasis on individuality and privacy as a basis for
negative thought is also no doubt controversial. It depends on the view
that certain spheres in earlier periods of capitalism provided space
for autonomous subjectivity, a view which would be questioned by other
theorists. For instance, feminists question whether the home has ever
been truly ‘private’, arguing that it embodies gender dynamics which
arise from the broader social structure and already render it a site of
reproductive labour, even before consumer culture is added.
Indeed, Marcuse is well aware, and often adds qualifiers, that the
older ‘gap’ was limited in often being a product of privilege. While
recognising such problems, I believe it is important to sustain the idea
of critical distance as a basis for escaping submersion. I think
Marcuse is right that distance from social submersion is necessary to
form critical perceptions, and that lack of awareness of this dimension
has long been fatal for leftist attempts to reformulate politics.
It is not so much that the private is an untouched space, as that the
creation of spaces beyond the dominant social field is necessary to
escape from psychological and discursive pressures to conform. To be
sure, such an escape does not guarantee that one will not remain pulled
by forces which are absent but powerful, but it potentially loosens
their hold.
While in societies where the ‘social’ remains a space of negation
partially separate from the forces of consumerism and conformity, it is
still possible for such a dimension to emerge first of all in collective
spaces, in societies similar to that described by Marcuse, it is
usually necessary for the initial break to occur on a personal level, as
an assertion of refusal or critical distance which establishes a
rupture with the system and hence also with the established forms of
community.
Only after such a rupture does it become possible to recompose social
relations on a different basis, among those who have undergone the
rupture.
Andrew Robinson is a political theorist and activist based in the UK. His book
Power, Resistance and Conflict in the Contemporary World: Social Movements, Networks and Hierarchies
(co-authored with Athina Karatzogianni) was published in Sep 2009 by
Routledge. His ‘In Theory’ column appears every other Friday.
Complete text here:
http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/64onedim/odmcontents.html
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